Beelink GT1 TV box in the Ultimate version

Beelink decided to release an “upgraded” version of its GT1 model, called the Ultimate. In practice, the differences from the previous version aren’t that significant, and that’s exactly what I wanted to talk about in today’s review.
Let’s see whether the upgrade is worth it, or whether they could have simply “left things as they were.”


As far as I can tell from the description, this is Beelink’s top-of-the-line TV box, at least among models with the S912 processor. Though what makes it “top-of-the-line” is simply the increased amount of RAM.
Specifications:
CPU — Amlogic S912
Number of cores — 8
Graphics — Mali-T820MP3
RAM — 3 GB DDR4
Flash memory — 32 GB
Wi-Fi: 2.4 / 5 GHz IEEE 802.11 b/g/n/ac
Bluetooth: Bluetooth 4.0
LAN — Ethernet 10/100M/1000M
Video output — HDMI 2.0, HDR, CEC and HDCP 2.2 support, and 4K*2K @ 60Hz resolution
Ports: 2x USB 2.0, Optical S/PDIF, RJ45, microSD card
Operating system — Android 7.1
Dimensions — 96 x 96 x 16 mm

The closest TV box I’ve reviewed in terms of specifications is the Vorke Z6, so I’ll compare the two from time to time.
The first differences are minor: Beelink has Android 7.1 and Bluetooth 4.0, compared with Android 7.1.2 and Bluetooth 4.1 on the Vorke Z6.

The packaging is made of sturdy black cardboard.
Brief specifications are printed on the bottom. All the accessories are packed in separate little boxes.


The package includes:
1. Beelink GT1 Ultimate TV box
2. Power supply
3. HDMI cable
4. IR remote control
5. Manual


The manual is brief and written in a “universal language”—pictures.
The HDMI cable matches Beelink’s design style and comes with a hook-and-loop cable tie. But it’s just a cable, really; the emphasis is more on its appearance.
The power supply has an ultra-compact design, about the size of a matchbox, with a rated output of 5 V, 2 A. It worked perfectly, but somehow these ultra-compact designs make me nervous.


The remote is quite convenient. It has a numeric keypad and several programmable buttons that can be taught to duplicate commands from your TV remote or any other device.


The design is pretty standard for a TV box: a small square box with a bit of decoration on top.


It’s noticeably smaller than the Vorke: 96 x 96 x 16 versus 113 x 113 x 26.


The selection of ports isn’t particularly varied either, and is typical of devices based on the S912 SoC.
On the back:
Power, USB, HDMI, LAN, Optical S/PDIF

On the left: USB and a microSD card slot.

The first thing I personally dislike about this TV box—and disliked about the Vorke—is that it has only two USB ports, and they’re both USB 2.0.


There’s nothing on the front or right side. Actually, there is: the power indicator is on the front, but the LED shines through the case, so it’s invisible when the box is off and barely visible when it’s on.


The bottom has several ventilation holes, a reset button opening, a sticker, and feet. Ah, the feet—I’ll have more to say about those.
The feet are like a goat’s horns so tiny and slippery that the TV box barely rests on them. Instead, it rests on the center of the bottom cover and can spin freely in place. The designers get a failing grade for this.


By the way, speaking of the case—and the weight—here’s a photo of the Beelink next to the box from my last review, the Wechip V8.
They’re roughly the same size.


But the weight is another matter. I noticed right away how heavy this Beelink is, especially considering its plastic case.


All right, let’s open it up and see how it’s put together. There has to be something good about it.

The box is fairly easy to open. The bottom is held in place by clips alone, though they’re quite sturdy.



The power indicator LED is partially covered for decorative purposes. The IR receiver is soldered in correctly, with its “legs” pointing down. The thing is, in some situations this can affect how reliably the device receives commands from the remote.


Some of the components inside are covered by a metal shield. It has... no, that's not thermal paste, but something more like thermally conductive rubber. I described a similar material in one of my reviews You spread it on, press the heatsink against it, and after a while the paste turns into a thin layer of rubber.


There is also a metal shield on the underside of the board. Quite a lot of TV boxes have a spot for this shield, which serves two purposes at once: heat dissipation and shielding. But it's rarely actually fitted.


The WiFi antenna is glued to the top of the case, which is good. But I don't really like the way it's connected to the board. Of course, this method is convenient for assembly, but it may weaken the signal a little. Though I could be wrong in this case.


On the underside of the board, near the power connector, there are some components that presumably provide power protection.


On the other side are the reset button, an electrolytic capacitor (the only one in the entire device), and four single-channel voltage regulators.


I almost always mention that there are footprints for protection components on the HDMI output, but they're left unpopulated. That's not a problem here: everything is in place. What's more, there are protection components on the USB data lines too, which is even rarer. Another point in its favor.


I mentioned above that it's quite heavy. No wonder, with a steel plate like that. By the way, the thermal interface is about 0.2-0.3 mm thick, and I think it could easily be replaced with thermal paste if I wanted to. That's probably what I'll do later.


Heat from the components is first transferred to the metal shields using thermal pads about 0.4-0.5 mm thick. It's certainly not the best solution. And once again, I'll have to criticize the developers for the poorly thought-out cooling system.
They seem to have done everything right: installed a large plate and avoided using thick rubber, as is sometimes the case. But not only is the plate on the underside of the case, meaning the heat from it effectively goes straight back to the board and heats it up, the ventilation holes are also small and on the bottom. In practice, the TV box lies flat on the table, belly-down.
So they did a great job in one area, but, as always, messed up another. We'll come back to the temperatures during testing.


Under the shield on top are the processor and a pair of RAM chips.


On the underside there are just two RAM chips. For obvious reasons, the processor isn't here :)


1. Amlogic S912 SoC
2. Samsung eMMC flash memory, 32 GB
3, 4. Four RAM chips: one pair has a capacity of 1 GB, the other 2 GB.


1. WiFi and Bluetooth module
2. RTL8111 chip for Gigabit Ethernet. This chip is used in almost all TV boxes with gigabit networking.
3, 4. Power regulators.


Software.
The boot screen is unusually understated. Usually they play some video here, make smoke appear, and so on.


On first startup, as usual, you're prompted to choose a language and time zone, adjust the screen display, and connect to a WiFi network. Though I couldn't see my router in the last step.


The home screen shows the most frequently used apps, along with access to settings, all apps, and the file manager.
It also displays the current time and, if you enter your city, the weather. The bottom menu slides up from the bottom of the screen; it's hidden by default. There's a power button for the TV box on the left.


The settings menu appears on the right side of the screen. Below are four separate menus combined into a single screenshot. General settings menu, screensaver options, and general information about the TV box.


Audio output settings


Video output and CEC control options.


Available video resolutions and formats.


If you want, you can open the more familiar Android settings panel from the menu above. There is no point in showing it, so I’ll just include the storage and RAM information.
Of the 32 GB preinstalled, about 25 GB is available to the user; the rest is taken up by the system and preinstalled software.


The TV box won’t update over the air, claiming that this firmware version is the latest, even though it’s fairly recent.


General information from CPU-Z.


Performance tests and temperature readings. Since I’ll be putting everything together in a comparison table at the end anyway, I’ll hide this section under a spoiler, but I’ll occasionally compare it with its closest competitor, the Vorke Z6.


WiFi test
Under normal conditions, the connection speed—as everyone understands—is more of a theoretical figure and has little to do with real-world speeds.


The actual speed is somewhat lower.
In the same room as the router, but at different distances and with obstacles in the way, data transfer speeds on the 2.4 GHz band ranged from 18 to 48 Mbps. On the 5 GHz band, at a distance of 2–3 m from the router, speeds reached almost 200 Mbps.


With a direct wired connection, speeds ranged from 600 to 650 Mbps.


Preinstalled apps.
It feels kind of... empty here. There’s literally just a basic set of apps for using the TV box, with practically no “extras”—not even the basic YouTube app.


Miracast, media players, PPPoE settings, and a firmware update utility.


You can install additional apps using the built-in utility, although the selection isn’t very large.


Alternatively, you can open the Play Store and install everything from there.


That’s exactly what I did. First, I opened the built-in utility and used it to install two versions of YouTube, Netflix, and HappyCast. The latter is supposedly something like Miracast, but I couldn’t get it to launch—nor could I get Netflix to work.


YouTube, on the other hand, worked fine. As I mentioned, there are two versions; the first one is shown below.


I had no trouble watching a beautiful video advertised as 60 fps, but as it turned out later, not all videos play in Full HD. Quite a lot of them run at 720p. I didn’t notice any clear pattern, but that’s how it is.
There were no freezes, stuttering, or anything like that.


The second version is usually included as a preinstalled app on most TV boxes. It also ran stably, except for one major drawback: the maximum quality was 480p. That really shocked me—480p on a TV box with a modern, powerful processor?


I downloaded Kodi from the Play Store and picked what looked like the latest version, more or less at random. Turns out I made the right choice: to start with, I had no trouble installing several add-ons for watching channels.


Then I checked that all the channels I’d picked at random worked without any problems at all. Overall, at this point I was completely satisfied with how Kodi performed.


Blu-ray rips also played without any problems. The temperature stayed steady at 70–71 degrees.
You can see a higher temperature in the screenshot above. At first I couldn’t figure out what was going on, since it climbed to 79–80 while playing Blu-ray rips. Later, though, I noticed that the Play Store was still running in the background. As soon as I closed it, the temperature dropped by about 10 degrees.


Alternative software
Unfortunately, I don’t have any good news here. Torrent TV stuttered and behaved as if I were on a dial-up connection, even though the channels started without any particular problems.


LOL!TV was noticeably more stable, though it didn’t always work very well either.
Some channels’ images would break up into squares or freeze. But the explanation was found almost immediately: these channels took a long time to load because of their low bitrate, and some channels would not load at all.


Some channels, however, displayed perfectly well. These were usually the ones that loaded almost instantly; at least, I couldn't take a screenshot of the loading process in time.


As for video playback, almost all the tests went off without a hitch.
1024x768_h265_AC3.mkv — no sound
2560x1600_AAC .mp4
3840x2160_AAC .mp4
4096x2160_AAC .mp4
gopro-hero-3-be-avc-high@l5.1-4096x2160-12p-aac-2ch.mp4
GraysPeak8HDR_Dolby AC3.mp4 — no sound
LG 4K Paris_AAC.mp4
LG 4K Story-of-Earth_AAC.mp4
LG_Chess_HDR.mp4
Philips_UHD_supershopdemo_1.mp4
samsung-note-3-3840x2160-high@l5.1-AAC-2ch-2.mp4
4K HD.Club Changhong-Furano-100mbps.mp4
Sony_4K_HDR_Camp.mp4
Ducks.Take.Off.720p.QHD.CRF24.x264-CtrlHD.mkv (20 Mbps)
Ducks.Take.Off.1080p.QHD.CRF25.x264-CtrlHD.mkv (108 Mbps)
Ducks.Take.Off.2160p.QHD.CRF25.x264-CtrlHD.mkv (243 Mbps) — dropped frames

The main complaints were the lack of AC3 audio support and USB 3.0. As a result, frames were dropped in the Ducks.Take.Off.2160p test because USB 2.0 didn't have enough bandwidth.


I could also nitpick the way Sony_4K_HDR_Camp.mp4 was displayed: the image seemed excessively contrasty to me. Here's a screenshot to show which file I'm talking about.


The test for correct “pixel-for-pixel” output at Full HD resolution also went without a hitch, though I had no doubts about that one.


Comparative test results. The TV boxes being compared are highlighted.
The AFR column shows “No?”. The question mark is there for a reason: I couldn't determine for sure whether this feature was present. Also, during one of the channel switches in Torrent TV, my monitor reported that the VGA input (I also tried it through an HDMI-to-VGA converter) was out of range, with the refresh rate set to 51 Hz. In other words, the TV box may have been trying to switch the refresh rate, but the monitor didn't recognize it. This happened only once, and I couldn't reproduce it in any of my subsequent attempts.
Firmware dated November 3, 2017 was used.


The TV box left me with mixed feelings. The build quality and components are quite good, and there was an attempt to improve the cooling system, but the overall design of that system was poorly thought out. The developers fitted a fairly large plate as a heatsink and transferred heat to it reasonably well, but placed it underneath the board. Combined with the lack of feet, this undermines any attempt to lower the temperature. The TV box stays below 65–72 degrees while playing video, which is tolerable, but under a full load it can easily reach 80 degrees.

I also noted the small power supply during the review. It works great in normal use (HDMI connected and an external hard drive), but if an HDMI-to-VGA converter is also connected to the output, you won't be able to start the hard drive.

I had no major issues with multimedia playback. The lack of AC3 support can be worked around by using alternative media players.
For online TV, you can install either YouTube or Torrent TV, but unfortunately both options have their own problems, as described in the review. Personally, I liked Kodi the most.

The 5 GHz wireless connection works great; 2.4 GHz is average. No complaints at all about the wired connection.

And finally, let's return to the model name, or more specifically, the “Ultimate” suffix. As you've probably gathered, the key difference is the increased RAM capacity of 3 GB. Personally, I don't think there's much difference between 2 and 3 GB at the moment, so I'd be more inclined to choose the former. But that's just my opinion; someone else may see it differently and choose the 3 GB version.
The store provided the coupon Xmas345 for this review, bringing the price to $67.99.

That's all for now. As usual, I'll be happy to answer questions in the comments. I hope this review was useful and helps you make the right choice.